“But does he know?” Lavender asked, as persistent as her mother.
I shook my head, wishing I could be thirteen and stick my lip out and say, I don’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to explain drunk and sketchy sexual decisions to a middle-schooler who had yet to kiss a boy. I could feel Rachel as a sudden, looming presence in the car, wanting me to tread very, very carefully here. Lavender looked up to me. It didn’t help that she was full of brand-new estrogen and had just watched her own father storm out the front door with a Whole Foods bag full of socks and underpants. Hormones and daddy issues, the classic recipe for pushing girls way too early into boy arms. “What does your mother tell you about sex?” I asked.
“Oh my God, like, nothing,” Lavender said, flushing. “I mean, she gave me a book about it. And she told me not to have it.”
“That’s excellent advice,” I said. “Reproduction works, Lav. It only takes once, and it can happen even if you think you’re being careful.”
“So you went on, like, one date?” Lavender asked.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing was it?”
A no-date thing, actually, and I could not remember his real name. I had a flash of Batman, that cocky grin under the cowl, his surprisingly well-muscled arms and shoulders—I’d assumed that definition had been drawn onto the costume—and now I thought, A really, really hot thing. The thought came so fast I was already saying it. At the last second, I replaced the word “hot” in the out-loud version.
“A really, really stupid thing.”
I didn’t even cross my fingers on the steering wheel. I wasn’t lying. It had been stupid. But also, I couldn’t help remembering, plenty hot.
“I want to know what happened,” Lavender insisted.
Nothing about this story was particularly thirteen-year-old-appropriate, but sometimes the world wasn’t. Thirteen-year-olds still had to live in it and not be lied to. Even so, the spirit of Rachel was practically a force now; there was honest, and then there was too honest. If I would not lie, Rachel expected me to at least be a good object lesson.
“I was at FanCon in Atlanta, and I had an awful day. So I went down to the bar, which was a bad idea. This guy came up and asked if he could buy me a drink.”
“What was his name?” Lavender asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
“What did he look like?” Lavender asked. Which was entirely not the point.
“I don’t know. He was dressed as Batman,” I said. “So I—”
“Batman?” Lavender interrupted, and then she snorted. Almost a laugh. “You love Batman! Was he a cute Batman?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter,” I repeated, but a sidelong glance at her told me that it did, to her. Well, at least it was a question I could mostly answer. “Um, he was around my age. African American. Deep voice—”
“He was black? You’re having a black baby?” Lavender interrupted again.
“Well, it’s half my baby, Lavender. He’ll be biracial, so I don’t know what he’ll look like or how he’ll think of himself.”
She was staring at me, big-eyed and silent.
“What?”
“God, Aunt Leia. You are just . . . so cool.”
Rachel was going to murder me.
“No, I’m not cool,” I said. “I’m reckless, and I let feeling crappy lead me into bad decisions. For the record, it didn’t make me feel better.” Not strictly true, but in the morning I’d been half dead of hangover, so it was true enough. “He could have been a rapist, or a psycho stalker, and I brought him right up to my room. He could have had a disease. I had to get tested for a bunch of crap, which was scary and embarrassing, and I still have to take another HIV test in a couple months, just to be safe. I was completely out of control, and now this baby—who I’m glad about, don’t get me wrong. I am going to love this kid. But, Lav, my kid is going to grow up with no father.”
That one hit her close. Maybe too close. She looked away, swallowing.
“That’s going to suck. Not having a dad,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she meant for the baby or for her. Maybe both.
I backpedaled, picking a different moral. “When you drink too much, you make choices that you might not make if you were sober.”
She rolled her eyes, accepting the subject change. “They told us at school.”
“Well, I’m telling you again,” I said. “It’s easy to drink too much, especially if you’re not used to it.”
Lavender nodded, very solemn. “So you’re saying I should start drinking as soon as possible and get used to it.”
She said it so earnestly it took me half a beat to realize she was trolling me. I smiled, relieved to see the sassy kid I knew was still there, under the unhappiness.
“Exactly. Birchville is in a dry county, or else I’d stop and get you a sippy cup of bourbon.” I turned us onto Main Street. “Look, we’re almost there.”
Lavender made a face, like she was smelling something less than savory. “This is Birchville?”
Up ahead we could see Walgreens and Subway across from Tiger Gas, a nod to Auburn. Alabama fans gassed up at the Shell.
“The edge of it,” I said. “You’ll see downtown after this intersection.”
She sat up straighter, looking around as we passed Piggly Wiggly, sharing its parking lot with Movie Town.
“What is that place?”
“You rent DVDs there. They also have tanning beds in the back,” I said. In some ways driving into Birchville was like driving thirty years into the past, the streets lined with colors and concepts right out of 1987.
“That’s freaky,” she said. “A lady on the corner is waving at us.”
Dot Foster, a sweet older woman who headed the Prayers and Squares ministry at First Baptist, had spotted the rental car. I waved back, and she hurried off toward Lois Gainey’s house. Within minutes the entire town would know I had arrived, toting an unknown adolescent. If no one remembered that I had a niece, they would deploy a scout to drop by to find out Lavender’s people and provenance. In other ways driving into Birchville was a lot like driving a hundred and thirty years into the past, all the way back to 1887.
I stopped at one of the three traffic lights, studying Lav as she studied my town.